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Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

bbc.co.uk

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Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#81

Post by maximus1983 »

specialist wrote: post #57
criley2 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even without political advertising, the amount of fake news spread in Groups in the form of memes and images is absolutely fracking staggering. If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda, and nothing real (for one ex: see the horribly faked Nancy Pelosi video that spread like wildfire yesterday, despite it's obvious fakeness)…

"conservative facebook user in their 50s+" I have two additional theories for why the boomers are more prone to spreading fake news. Maturity Every person, demographic adopting a new media has to go through the whole maturity cycle anew. We've all been there. (For me it was CompuServe, BIX, FidoNet.) We've always had trolls, memes, jokes etc. So netiquette and its predecessors emerge. It takes a while for the novelty…

The whole fake news / conspiracy stuff gets me.

I find conspiracy theories to be almost like some sort of sci-fi / fantasy lore.

I love watching stuff like Ancient Aliens, I know it is complete nonsense but it is fun laughing at all the begging the question they do.

My other half believes in some super natural stuff such as horoscopes etc and she gets a bit annoyed at me and my brother taking the mickey out of it but that is about as far as the "harm" goes with most of this stuff.

Trying to stop people believing in crazy things just isn't possible and actively trying to suppress it online will just make it worse.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#82

Post by thatoneuser »

anonymous5133 wrote: post #79

I never knew how many fake profiles exist on facebook until I tried to buy a $10 amazon gift card with paypal in one of the groups I was joined. I missed all the red flags. First, the profile was an attractive female with little account activity. Second, when I tried to send the paypal payment it defaulted to PHP currency (Philippines money) even though the seller said they lived in the United States. Third, the acco…

What was this scam?

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#83

Post by viraptor »

soulofmischief wrote: post #54
criley2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it's Pandora's Box. It's an information singularity. We have political information anarchy. Anyone can do a hack job on a video and get 100,000,000 views and a Presidential tweet and control a news cycle. People are afraid of "Deep fakes" but the reality is is that people are so conditioned towards accepting faked information that "shallow" (lol) fakes are already extremely effective. It's not "social media" w…

This has been freaking me out lately. I am trying to form a model of how a society would typically evolve past this situation and continue to advance and spread while maintaining humane and truly representative systems of government. So far I haven't come up with anything good. But it is a singularity. We don't know what is on the other side. Or if there even is another side. We are stumbling backwards into a world w…

> I think it would be interesting to start a company around the idea of creating a certificate authority and system for provisioning and securely storing keys on a hardware level in order to sign and verify "unmodified" footage.

This is also described in (if I remember correctly) "The player of games" where videos were widely known as impossible to trust due to how easy it is to make fakes, but AI entities could testify that they received the realtime, live feed if you needed a proof.

Great idea way ahead of its time (1988)

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#84

Post by mrlanderson »

soulofmischief wrote: post #54
criley2 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, it's Pandora's Box. It's an information singularity. We have political information anarchy. Anyone can do a hack job on a video and get 100,000,000 views and a Presidential tweet and control a news cycle. People are afraid of "Deep fakes" but the reality is is that people are so conditioned towards accepting faked information that "shallow" (lol) fakes are already extremely effective. It's not "social media" w…

This has been freaking me out lately. I am trying to form a model of how a society would typically evolve past this situation and continue to advance and spread while maintaining humane and truly representative systems of government. So far I haven't come up with anything good. But it is a singularity. We don't know what is on the other side. Or if there even is another side. We are stumbling backwards into a world w…

Full email address in profile?

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#85

Post by yyy888sss »

thatoneuser wrote: post #82
anonymous5133 wrote: post #79

I never knew how many fake profiles exist on facebook until I tried to buy a $10 amazon gift card with paypal in one of the groups I was joined. I missed all the red flags. First, the profile was an attractive female with little account activity. Second, when I tried to send the paypal payment it defaulted to PHP currency (Philippines money) even though the seller said they lived in the United States. Third, the acco…

What was this scam?

There are groups (on Discord, Facebook) where people sell Amazon gift card codes for less than the value of the gift card. Sometimes they are real codes that have been bought with accounts that have been hacked through email phishing, and sometimes they are completely fake.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#86

Post by Deimorz »

threeseed wrote: post #4

During the recent Australian election there were a number of Facebook advertisements by political figures which were completely false e.g. Labor party imposing a death tax. And given that the election result was pretty close it could've easily have made a difference. So I couldn't care less whether Facebook culled 3 billion profiles or not. What I need is for Facebook to make the hard choice and stop allowing politic…

WSJ article from yesterday: https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ends-commissions-for-p...

> In the wake of revelations about Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, senior leaders at the company debated whether it should cease running political ads entirely, former employees familiar with the discussions said. Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg made the final call to stay in the business, though changes will be made to how it operates, one former employee said.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#87

Post by antpls »

forgotmypw wrote: post #74
rwmj wrote: post #70

They didn't catch the 3 fake profiles I set up on Facebook. I've not used them for five or more years, but I checked recently and they are still there and still let me log in without so much as a "where you been". They all have obviously fake names and were used only for testing advertising at various times in the past.

They did, however, "catch" my Instagram account, which was only used by a human (me). Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted anything, but I did have a profile picture, followed accounts, and commented on posts. Then, one day, I tried to log in, and it was gone. Email address not recognized in password reset. No trace of any kind. So long, Instagram.

Same for me recently. Now that Instagram IS Facebook, maybe Facebook doesn't make a difference between fake Instagram accounts and fake Facebook accounts in the report ?

I have both fake Facebook accounts and Instagram accounts (like 3 or 5), and Instagram deactivated a recent account I created for "suspicious activities". I only liked one picture of an actual person and sent one private message with that account... Meanwhile, my other 4 Instagram accounts and Facebook accounts are fine, even if I sent and liked total garbage

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#88

Post by adventured »

forgotmypw wrote: post #74
rwmj wrote: post #70

They didn't catch the 3 fake profiles I set up on Facebook. I've not used them for five or more years, but I checked recently and they are still there and still let me log in without so much as a "where you been". They all have obviously fake names and were used only for testing advertising at various times in the past.

They did, however, "catch" my Instagram account, which was only used by a human (me). Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted anything, but I did have a profile picture, followed accounts, and commented on posts. Then, one day, I tried to log in, and it was gone. Email address not recognized in password reset. No trace of any kind. So long, Instagram.

> Since posting is not possible without installing the app, I never posted anything

You can post from eg desktop Chrome, without using the app. I routinely do this since I don't like installing FB apps on my phone. I often edit photos on my desktop prior to uploading, so it's just plain convenient.

Sign in on the desktop with Chrome. Go to your default home page (the person body icon). Right mouse click -> inspect page.

At the top, change the page to responsive, and set something like eg 680x680 as the dimensions for the page (you can drag resize to different dimensions). Now reload the page. It will present the standard mobile interface bar at the bottom of the page, including the ability to upload images (the plus icon within a box).

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#89

Post by mettamage »

Well fortunately they didn't catch my account. And I'm happy they didn't. My fake account allows me to:

1. Login to websites that I don't want to share my actual contacts to but just my real name (my fake account has my real name and my real account a fake-ish name so that I can't be Googled too easily).

2. Disable that annoying wall by not having a lot of friends.

3. Be part of meaningful groups (only 1 so far), because my friends know that I have this fake account with a real name.

4. Amazing account for demo purposes when I was working at a coding school.

5. My fake account is setup on auto login on my primary browser, so if I type "fa" and press enter, I feel bored by the empty wall and very tiny friends list, instead of engaged. My main account is auto-logged in to messenger, so that's where I go now.

Re: Facebook: Another three billion fake profiles culled

#90

Post by prewett »

criley2 wrote: post #7
threeseed wrote: post #4

During the recent Australian election there were a number of Facebook advertisements by political figures which were completely false e.g. Labor party imposing a death tax. And given that the election result was pretty close it could've easily have made a difference. So I couldn't care less whether Facebook culled 3 billion profiles or not. What I need is for Facebook to make the hard choice and stop allowing politic…

Even without political advertising, the amount of fake news spread in Groups in the form of memes and images is absolutely fracking staggering. If you go through the facebook feed of a conservative facebook user in their 50s+, you quite literally will see all lies and propaganda, and nothing real (for one ex: see the horribly faked Nancy Pelosi video that spread like wildfire yesterday, despite it's obvious fakeness)…

> There is no viable solution either.

There is a solution: make a cost to post. In the past it cost real money to propagate your ideas, so your audience was limited. The only way to get money was to be rich or to be popular enough for people to pay for your newspaper/magazine/mailing list. The internet lets anyone have a language-wide reach for free. I guess one should expect that in this situation the messages that will dominate are the people that have an incentive to shout loudly, which is what we seem to have.

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